I was going to write a serious post for today. I have this thing on the political (and non-political) ramifications of sexual attraction that I’ve been sort of picking away at for about a week. But I’ll probably just summarize it in a sentence or two like I did with that breadwinner satire I completely fucked off into a closing paragraph.
Basically, what I’ve been trying to articulate is that I hear and see a lot of stuff that suggests that the mere attraction of heterosexual men to women is in itself a sexist act, and I completely disagree. You see a person somewhere and apropos of nothing but the image being transmitted to your eyeballs, your hotparts make a decision about them. That’s not sexist, it’s just attraction. There’s nothing inherently political about wanting to tongue fuck a person. How you act on that feeling, or how much value you ascribe to it can be sexist, but your initial feelings are just that: feelings.
Most of this attribution of natural human instinct to sexism seems to come from the guys I know, and some I don’t know. The thing that originally inspired this post was an anxious dad on Reddit complaining that he didn’t want dudes to “objectify” his daughter the way he objectified the ladies he saw in his day to day life. I can’t find it again, it was awhile ago, but it made me realize that this is something a lot of feminist men must go through.
This is going to sound rude, but newsflash straight male feminists worried that the mere reality of your desire for a woman magically makes her into an object. Your dick might be awesome, but nothing is that incredible. So yeah, you wake up one day and you’re Louis C.K. and all you want to do is just rub your penis in that sweet librarians’s hair. What do you think the rest of us go around thinking about? Unicorns? Yeah, but probably only because of the HUGE FUCKING DONG ON THEIR HEAD. Do you think I follow the beard porn tumblr because I think beards are pretty? Ok, I do. And I want to rub my vagina all over every beard I see this is not a joke, this is totally serious but I’ll act like it’s a joke if you ever bring it up in public because we live in a society where female sexuality is considered terrifying. Even to females.
And that’s the thing, isn’t it? It’s not that women don’t have equally offensive sexual thoughts and desires. It’s just that we’ve been trained to hide that away in the smallest, littlest, darkest corner of our brains because it’s totally shameful for a woman to want to express her sexual desire at all in any way. This is not an exaggeration.
That dad on Reddit was horrified that someone would be thinking about his daughter in the same way he thought about the women he was attracted to. It probably never occurred to him that his daughter would be thinking about the people she’s attracted to in much the same way. I’ve talked about this before, but when my dad gave me the sex talk, it amounted to a lot of vague language and warnings about how disgusting boys are. It left me with the impression that sex was absolutely something that could never be referred to in plain language, and it also made me wonder if I was broken.
My dad did the best he could with what he had, and I appreciate how candid and honest he was with me on basically every other topic. I probably got twice the sex talk he got. But in the end, I dismissed the idea that boys were into depths of depravity I couldn’t even think of, and decided there must be something wrong with me. I became concerned that I was somehow backwards in my desire, that other girls didn’t feel the way I did. To be honest, most of them didn’t, but most of them also weren’t in the physically abusive situations I was in. Talking to other people as an adult has shown me that I was not actually that different from a lot of my peers, even with the abuse.
If you want to rub your penis in a librarians hair, that doesn’t make you a bad feminist. If you treat that librarian differently, or if you treat the women you don’t want to hair-fuck differently based solely on this metric then you are a bad feminist and you should probably look at that. It’s your actions that matter, not your feelings.
Oh, here’s the Louis C.K. segment I was referring to, if you were curious.
